As air travel continues to increase, so do the demands for the handling of aircraft baggage, including personal luggage as well as items of many other kinds. It is well known to use pallets for the handling of such baggage. In the prior art there has been an established practice of using pallets of either regular or full width, or else half width, to support the baggage while it is being transported. A loading system for loading the pallets on an aircraft must automatically adjust itself to the handling of whichever width of pallet is being presented to it at a particular moment.
Mechanical systems of this general type have long existed--see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,374,604 issued Mar. 26, 1968 for Automatic Carton Handling Machine--but each system tends to be somewhat unique, as are the problems attendant upon its usage. For the aircraft pallets, a commonly used system of apparatus is that shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,696,609 issued Sep. 29, 1987. The pallet restraint mechanism shown in that patent includes a rotatably supported wing member 44 that has a plate-like main body and a latch portion of generally rectangular configuration which extends longitudinally from one end of the main body. The latch portion is connected to a central bar 48. Rotatable movement of the central bar may drive the wing member in rotation through an arcuate movement of about ninety degrees; or, alternatively, rotation of the wing member may drive the rotation of the central bar in a like rotary movement.
A long-standing problem of the apparatus referred to above has been the occasional failure or breakage of the wing member. The wing member has tended to crack at the interface between its latch portion and its main body portion. This has necessitated shutting down the baggage transfer operation while repairs are made or another method of handling can be called into action.
An individual replacement part such as a wing member is not expensive. The hitherto unsolved problem has been that failure of the wing member usually occurs during the process of either loading or unloading an aircraft, with consequent delays in completing the baggage transfer operation. While such delays may seem unimportant to a manufacturer who supplies the system of apparatus and is therefore in a position to profitably sell replacement parts as well, to a passenger who is waiting in an airport terminal for arrival of his or her baggage the delay can be very serious.